The Warlock's Errand Girl
by Ruze a Koure
Summary: Sometimes Vika Vlčeková wonders what horrible sin she committed in a past life to end up as harried apprentice, beleaguered assistant and occasional reluctant criminal accomplice to the High Warlock of Brooklyn, Magnus Bane. Malec, Clace, OC/Magnus. Please review! I would appreciate constructive criticism.
1. knockknockknock

_**If I have prophecy and know all mysteries and knowledge**_  
_**And if I have all faith so as to remove mountains**_  
_**But have not love, I am nothing.**_

_New York, USA - 2015_

There was a knock at the door.

Alec rolled over and blearily cracked open his eyes to check the floating numbers of the clock. Pale moonlight flooded the room from the open window - Magnus was asleep at the desk in the corner of the room, the light sending oily sheens across the twisted dark silk of his hair, causing shadows to dance in the hollow of his throat and along the thin skin of his beglittered eyelids.

The knock came again, a light rap on the apartment door, and Alec pulled himself up. Who would be knocking at three o'clock in the morning?

He pulled on a sweater from the floor and padded barefoot down the stairs. None of the wards or runes had been activated, so he doubted that there would be any danger, but nevertheless his fingers found a seraph blade and tucked it discretely into his belt.

What had become known as the Mortal War had ended years ago with Sebastian's death and Lewis' sacrifice, and Alec was glad to be able to think that the Shadow World had settled somewhat. Certainly there were fewer life-or-death situations in the morning before he had coffee, and it was rare that he found himself saving the world on a weekend. The Downworlders and the Shadowhunters were approaching something like friendship for the first ever time, and demon attacks seemed to be becoming more and more infrequent with each passing day.

Jace and Isabelle, Alec knew, were bored out of their minds but he was content. The world almost seemed to have returned to a kind of equilibrium, and he smiled at the thought.

Then he opened the door.

A girl, apparently mundane, dressed in jeans and a hoody, stood on the doorstep with the golden streetlight playing a game of light and shadows across her face. Her long, loosely braided hair was the colour of starlight and nearly touched her waist; her skin was a nut-brown that spoke of a mixed racial heritage and much time spent in more exotic places; her flinty eyes were the pale grey of storm clouds and they were inscrutable as she glanced up at Alec.

"Ah. _Magnus 'terbaru ... laki. Adalah bajingan di rumah_?"

Alec was saved from answering by the sound of footsteps as Magnus approached. Placing one hand on the small of Alec's back and leaning forward slightly to see the girl, the warlock's expression changed minutely, surprise and suspicion chasing away the tiredness that had etched his brow.

"Vee," he said in surprise, "_Apa sih yang kamu lakukan di sini?_" He wasn't surprised for long. The girl's stormy eyes narrowed as she caught sight of Magnus.

"_Magnus_," she growled, and attacked.


	2. Hither-and-Thither

_Praha, Ceská republika - 1970_

The girl on the bridge could make the puppet dance as though it moved at a single thought - the movements of the mannequin were so smooth and careful as to be on the uncanny side of realistic, and at certain points no one in the crowd could see a single string tying the two, broken doll and beautiful girl, together.

The marionette looked like an ancient thing, something that had once been much-loved and much-cherished and had, as an unfortunate consequence of the care and love lavished on it, spent much of the last century gathering a thin layer of dust across its carefully painted features in a faraway attic. The skirt of its pale silver ballet costume, was ripped, its striped tights laddered, and one strap of its faded grey camisole top slipped down the slender twig of its arm. A silky matrix of spidersilk had been spun between the chopstick holding the doll's hairstyle in place and the elegant v of its neck and collarbone, and even the effortless dance of the puppet did nothing to dislodge the web or the spider that hung lazily from the apex as the doll moved back and forth on the wall of the bridge, somersaulting to the pavement, darting from the footpath.

The marionette moved with an elegance that was not often mustered even by human beings; it did not overbalance nor trip nor hesitate, and never was there the slightest hint that it was being propelled by anything but the force of its own will - no leap too high, no movement too sudden, no step too large, just one gesture fading into another.

The only sign that the silver-haired girl had anything to do with the doll's dance was the dance of her fingers as though she were conducting the violinist whose instrument sang along with the performance, releasing note after note after heartbreaking, bittersweet note into the air. When that song rose to a sudden crescendo and then ended, the song hovering, caught in the air, for a few moments longer, the doll's dance also ended, and it collapsed to the ground as though all of the strings holding it aloft had been unceremoniously cut - an angel fallen from heaven, dark hair spilled on the ground around a pale face. No longer a piece of art with a mind of its own - just a pile of wood and metal and string lying at the silver-haired girl's shoes.

If the crowd expected a bow or an encore, or indeed any sort of acknowledgement, they were to be disappointed. The puppeteer moved for the first time with the same kind of speed and grace that her doll had displayed at a gesture of her hand - in the blink of an eye, her violin case was closed and the marionette had been scooped up bodily and the girl was walking away from her performance spot as though she had never stopped to perform at all.

Walking away from the bridge that Sunday evening in early December, no sinister premonitions about the day approaching bothered Vika Vlčeková.

The only problem bothering her at all at that moment was that the comforting weight of the violin case fillef with hard-earned money in one hand and her grandfather's art in the other left her no space to carry her coffee as she walked back to her apartment.

Luckily, it was for such situations as these that Vika had ensured that she had cultivated friendships, and she was glad to see Mikael waiting for her outside their usual cafe, holding two styrofoam cups of coffee with his violin under his arm as he effortlessly charmed two teenage tourists out of their phone numbers. As Vika approached, the prettier of the two leaned forward and wrote something with a flourish on one of the cups, laughing a little and flicking her hair over one shoulder. Vika hung back by the bridge until the two had moved away and she could swap the violin case for one of the coffees. She peered at the scrawled number on her cup as they began to walk towards the Old Town, smiling a little.

"You sure you don't want to keep this? Sven - Svella - Svetlana seemed eager to get to know you."

"Absolutely certain." Mikael shrugged. "She's not really my type."

"And what, you think she's mine? Mind you, I do like blondes." Vika glanced at him, raising her eyebrows. "What so you mean, your type? You have a type now?"

"Of course I do." He smirked. "I have high standards to maintain. I won't allow myself to date anyone uglier than I am."

"She was absolutely gorgeous!" Vika protested in disbelief. The same could not be said for her friend - though to a certain degree handsome and certainly aided by the dim light, his charm lay more in his body language and movements than in any physical attributes.

"So am I."

"I don't know about 'absolutely'."

"I am _reasonably_ gorgeous."

She laughed. "Define reasonably. I don't think that word means what you think it means."

"I have not yet blinded someone with my beauty but I have taken quite a few girl's breath away."

"Probably," Vika said, blowing distractedly on her coffee to cool it. "Because they were laughing so hard. It may be hazardous to their health."

"O ye of little faith. I think you're still a little sore that I broke up with you."

"Hang on - if anyone dumped anyone, it was me-you. I distinctly remember telling you that it wasn't me, it was you."

He smiled. "I was too busy sobbing my eyes out to pay attention, I guess. You were unnecessarily cruel to my delicate pride, fragile ego and bruised masculinity."

"The first two have obviously made a fine recovery and I don't really want to talk about the third."

They were coming to the edge of the Old Town, sipping coffee and chatting.

Later, Vika tried to convince herself that for the briefest moment that she had been blind and happy - but even as Mikael went to cross the street Vika couldn't stop herself from flinging out a hand and catching him before he could step out in front of a rattling bone carriage that had taken the corner at speed and looked as though it had raced out from the pages of a horror novel. Drawn by skinless, fleshless steeds and steered by a figure shrouded in papery robes, it careened past, invisible to all but Vika, who shuddered at its passing. Vika watched it disappear, hardly noticing that Sebastian was talking until the bone carriage had taken another abrupt turn and disappeared. "_Ano_," she said. "Sorry?"

The bone carriage wouldn't have hit him anyway. She knew it wouldn't. Those strange, silent figures who directed it at least knew how to drive, unlike some people - no, not people, not really - she could mention.

"What the hell was that all about?"

Mikael looked equal parts concerned, curious and annoyed, but all Vika could do was shake her head, and try to think of an excuse that would not make her seem insane.

"Uh," she said simply, and was aware of a man nearby laughing quietly at her awkwardness. When she allowed her gaze to slip past Mikael, she could see the man, head down with an old-fashioned bowler hat obscuring his face, looking amused. For a moment her heart constricted before the glamour peeled away under her focused gaze and she saw the green skin beneath the man's hat, between his gloves and sleeve.

Not him, then.

"I meant to ask you," she said, trying to improvise as the red light appeared on the traffic light and the highly amused ifrit crossed the road, still giggling. "Whether you wanted to go at get something to eat. I'm starving."

He glanced at his watch, but Vika could still see the expression in his eyes - the expression that said '_I don't believe you and you're acting... well, not crazier than usual but certainly a degree of crazy_'.The expression said: '_most people can invite other people to a cafe without attempting to break their ribs_'. The expression said: '_why oh why am I friends with you?_'

Vika swore that she would love him forever when she heard his next sentence.

"Růžena's probably working the late shift at Sebastian's. We could go there and invite her on her break, if that's okay with you?"

Relief flooded her. She had done nothing to deserve such friends.

Vika tried not to make it too obvious that she was scanning the sky for any sign otherwise, any sign that it was not okay - but if he was back in Prague, he had neglected to get back into contact with her, and for that, at this moment, she could only be glad.

"Yeah," she said, with a smile. "Sure, that sounds great."

Mikael smiled and looked as though he were almost going to laugh. Vika turned to cast one last glance in the direction the bone carriage had taken before she took a sip of coffee - and sighed in exasperation.

The tourist's phone number had rearranged itself upon the cup, the tiny ink digits unfolding and reforming like tiny black marks come alive. They contorted and twisted themselves into new letters, new words, a new message, in an all-too-distinctive handwriting.

**DID YOU MISS ME? **

And then, as soon as she had read the words they were unwritten and rewritten anew -

**ASAP9876DO**

"Um, Mikael?" Vika said, trying to inject an apologetic note into her voice as she silently willed death upon the cup. "Raincheck on that meal."

He turned from where he stood, already a few metres ahead. "Another one of your errands?"

"Something like that," Vika said. "I just remembered that I have a... to do a family thing."

She didn't look up to see his disbelieving expression. Vika never spoke about her family, mainly because they only existed when it was convenient for her excuses and lies and half-stories for them to exist.

"I'll make it up to you," she said, and turned, and was walking away before he could answer her. If he replied, his response was lost to the greedy wind before Vika ever heard the words.

* * *

It was a remarkable sight, the sky beginning to stain the clouds bloody with crimson light, all the towers of Prazský hrad bathed in a soft glow, the tangled cobbled streets still curtained with shadows, lit only with the weaving, winking fireflies that were the city's lamplights and headlights. Vika leant against the wall from her perch on the balcony railing, her long grey hair stirring softly around her face in the gentle touch of the morning breeze. "Honestly," she said, in English for the benefit of the man behind her. "I don't see why you ever left the city. Especially with a view like this."

Magnus Bane straightened, correcting the fall of his jacket with a sharp tug. He was dressed in an unusually mundane and sombre fashion - no elaborate brocade jackets or ruffled shirts or high buckled shoes - and he was frighteningly devoid of glitter. The lone lantern lighting the apartment cast a blue sheen across the rough black silk of his hair and sent the silver loop in his ear aglitter brilliantly with a thousand colours that did nothing to lighten his expression. "Prague is so very dull," he said, his cat-like golden eyes distracted - no doubt by one of the mad, half-considered ideas that so often derailed the broken-down wreck he called a train of thought. "No magic carpets, no drug-addled vampires, very few apocalyptic madmen. What am I meant to do with myself all day?"

"Get a hobby," Vika said without a trace of sympathy. "Something that doesn't involve chaos and mayhem and bloodshed. Something where I don't have to rush across the city at the crack of dawn to help you unpack. Maybe then I could get some sleep without running to-and-fro and hither-and-thither at your every whim."

She raised her eyebrows - unlike Bane's, hers worked in tandem and it was her constant shame that she could not arch a single brow as the warlock could. Bane, she mused often, was rather a master at facial expressions - he could build a girl up or tear a man down with the slightest quirk of his lip, arch of his brow, inclination of his head - his expression alternately playful or terrifying. Vika, unfortunately, lacked this skill of her boss, along with nearly every other skill that the warlock possessed.  
Bane merely shrugged off her comments as though he had barely noticed them, like so much rain rattling on a window pane - she was making noise but no impact.

"Where have you been recently that was so interesting, anyway?" she asked, tilting her head so that she could see him.

"Here and there and everywhere," he said vaguely. "New York is very nice in the winter."

She jumped down from the balcony, and considered the warlock who had been her boss, mentor and bane of her existence for nearly nine years. "I'm guessing," she said. "That you didn't call me up here because you wanted someone to admire the scenery with you." After all, the sooner she got this job over and done with - whatever it was - the sooner she could return to her normal life, where men were rarely (if ever) green, and malfunctioning magic carpets were not considered a significant problem, and no one spoke Cthonian or Tartarian, and demons did not - could not - exist. "Where am I going today? Bucharest? Bishkek? Belfast?"

"Not quite so far," he replied, turning ceaselessly on the spot for a moment, his eyes scanning his belongings - he may as well have been talking to the air for all the attention he paid to her. "Aha!" He plucked the offending object up and held it out to her - an envelope, slim enough that she doubted there was anything inside, even a sheet of paper. "Take this - don't look inside - don't even hold it up to the light and take a peek - no - I don't trust you - I know what you're like, Emily - you need to take it to the cathedral - now where has that parcel gone?"

He disappeared into one of the many other rooms of the apartment, and a bored Vika took the opportunity to pick up one of the books that lay on top of the box nearest to her. A book of runes - she recognized most of those embossed on the leather cover. Had she helped him bind this tome? Perhaps not Bane - maybe this was one of those books she had worked on during one of the many long, lazy summers spent with Fell or Loss when Bane couldn't be bothered to deal with a bored, restless teenage apprentice and she had been too young and immature to be left alone.

She flipped open the cover. She recognised those runes printed on the page - Clairvoyance, Healing, Intuition - but in the margins were scribbled new shapes and figures and runes. At the top of the page, her own cramped handwriting - _Marrakesh, '69_.

The less said about that trip, she thought, the better.

She set the book back down just in time for Bane to reappear with a package in his hand, wrapped untidily in brown paper, secured with butcher's string. Distinctly unfabulous - she doubted very much that this was Bane's own handiwork. She tucked it under her arm and nodded. "The cathedral?" she prompted him.

He nodded, looking distracted. "You'll need to get in at the top," he said, and he barely seemed to notice the smile that spread across Vika's face.

"Can I fly?" she asked.

He looked at her. "I don't know, Lucy. Can you?" And then he was gone again, muttering to himself in Indonesian as he crossed the threshold from one room to another.

The front door swung open, the meaning evident. Time to go, Vika. Go forth and run his errands like a good girl. She muttered something unpleasant about his questionable heritage under her breath as she tucked the envelope into her jacket and stepped back towards the balcony railing.

How long had it been since she had last flown? Too long - but Magnus usually did the spell for her, and Vika's magic was untrustworthy at the best of times. She didn't want to soar a hundred feet above the city only to have the spell fade or flicker at the worst possible moment.

She steeled herself. Bane wouldn't always be around to do the work for her, and she had improved a lot in the last few months when he had been absent, despite her infrequent practise beyond simple parlour tricks.

She jumped up to the wrought-iron balcony railing with none of the elegance of her puppet, balancing herself precariously, crouching to steady herself. She took the opportunify to tie the package to her belt - once she had dropped one of Magnus' strange packages and had spent the following three weeks a beautiful pale blue colour with tiny horns sprouting from her cheekbones and an inability to speak anything but Avestan and Chhattisgarhi.

She rose lightly to her feet, balancing precariously on her toes at the edge of the railing. She took a deep breath and stepped backwards.

There was a brief moment of panic, exhilaratiom, pure adrenaline, as nothingness engulfed her and she was in freefall. Her mind was blank - the spell, the enchantment, fly girl fly.

The ground wasted no time in rushing up to meet her.

Bane's magic was as ostentatious as he was - blue tongues of fire, blazing sparks of energy, the frission of magic tangible as he worked. Vika's was not so dramatic or impressive - it was quiet, simple and unexceptional, much like herself. Her magic, slight though it was, manifested itself simply in a changing of laws, of reality, as the natural world stretched to accomodate the decidedly unnatural. It had unnerved Bane at first at how subtle her magic was.

The rush of air as her falling body cleaved a path through the sky, the burst of light above her as the sun burst over the horizon, her own exhilarated laughter all conspired to wipe the correct enchantment from her mind. And she doubted she could do anything to help herself if she hit the ground.

She closed her eyes. Pictured the rune.

She didn't even have time to focus.

Then she changed angle abruptly, so suddenly that she spun, starlight hair whipping, and she was heading back up the way she had come, towards the rising sun.

Flying, she was relieved to find anew, was easy.


	3. knockknockknock II

_New York - 2015_

After the girl had attempted to strangle Magnus with a hug and simultaneously scream at him in Indonesian, Alec found himself relegated to making tea for the impromptu gathering and allowed the two, warlock and mundane, to speak in the sitting room while he tried to hear what the two were saying - a difficult task indeed, considering the fact the girl did not seem to have much English and switched languages

"_Apa sih yang kau pikirkan!_"

"It's good to see you too, Vee."

"_Ai fi putut fi ucis!_"

"I doubt that very much."

"_Máte nějakou představu, jak dlouho jsem hledal pro vás?_"

A silence.

"_Trieset godini!_"

Another pause.

"That's a long time indeed."

"I swear to God I will kill you, Magnus Bane."

"Many better than you have tried."

The scenario that greeted Alec as he entered with the pot of tea would have been comical if he wasn't so utterly confused. The girl was pacing back and forth across the room - as best one could pace in a living room such as Magnus', where clothes and books and Angel knew what else was strewn every which way. Her anger made her skin look tight on her bones, her dark eyes cold, and she barely looked up at Alec as he entered.

Magnus, by contrast, had thrown himself on the couch and lay there casually, half-smiling. His trademark blue flames danced in the fireplace, making Vee look pale and setting Magnus' eyeshadow glittering. Vee's shadow danced crazily on the walls, as though it were alive, and Alec found himself avoiding it as best he could, no matter how irrational that may be.

The girl he had called Vee turned as Magnus sat up to help Alec.

"No calls," she said. "No nothing. You could have been dead."

"Yes," Magnus said after a moment. "I could have."

"What the hell were you thinking?"

" '_Oh God, oh God, we're all going to die_'. Something like that."

Alec tried to interject without sounding like an idiot. "Ah, you two know each other?"

For the first time, the two looked at him - Magnus with an eyebrow arched, Vee with her arms folded.

Yes. He had sounded like an idiot.

"Something like that," Magnus said at the same time that Vee said, "Once upon a time."

"So. What exactly is the story here?" Alec asked.

"It's a long story," Magnus said.

"Especially when you tell it," Vee added. She sighed, accepted a mug of tea and threw herself down onto one of the nearest armchairs with a theatricality that reminded Alec of Magnus. "I guess we should start at the beginning."


	4. It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

_Carpathian Mountains, Transylvania, Romania - 1960_

"Her name?"

The old man, bent and aged, his body twisted like an ancient tree root bursting free of the soil, looks at the girl across whose features fire plays, and for a long moment, he cannot remember his granddaughter's name, though it was he himself who gave the name to her and told her to keep it safe forever.

He finds that it is difficult to speak, to even think - it is as though this stranger's presence has drawn all of the words out of the air so that his mind spins in an attempt to slot sounds together. His gnarled oakwood cane is all that keeps him upright as he tries to avoid the other man's strange feline eyes that share the same predatory look as the lean, mange-ridden streetcat his granddaughter lets in the workshop window when he is absorbed in his work.

How can he remember that but not her very name?

She speaks before he can. "My name is Vika," she says, and although her voice rings hollow of the fierceness that flickers in her eyes like the reflection of a faraway fire, it is certainly more than her grandfather has so far managed and it causes the visitor to regard her with a strange expression apparent in his strange cat-like eyes. She meets his gaze, more from curiousity than the bravado she displays, and they stay for a moment locked in an intangible competition, as her grandfather begins to fully realise the extent of the regret he feels for ever allowing the stranger to pass over his threshold.

"Vika," the stranger repeats, and then a smile spreads across his face like the sunlight staining the horizon at sunrise. "I suppose," he says to the slender girl who holds herself like a willow reed - as though there is a string passing through the top of her head, pulling her straight, as though she is considering taking flight like a bird. She looks little like her grandfather, although they share the same bronzed skin and dark hair. Her features are delicate where his are strong, but her eyes contain a spark that his do not. "You are the one who made this?"

He holds out the watch that he grasps in one hand, a small clockwork mechanism that is as delicate in its detailing as it perfect in its engineering. Just as each cog fits together to perfection and clicks almost silently to turn the tiny pieces, a silver dragon curls about the face of the watch, stretching out with each passing hour of the day. A princess paces the tiny cogs, her steps rising and falling as she clambers over the tiny grooves of the clockwork mechanisms. The tiny stars and moon that surround the face move with each passing hour and each passing day - if wound correctly, the clockwork moon and stars ought to align correctly with the real ones, and it causes an amused quirk to twitch the stranger's lips as he notices the petulant annoyance that crosses the girl's face when she notes that this has been neglected.

"I was very impressed," he says. "Very impressed."

She smiles, the first true smile she has allowed to slip since he stepped over the threshold shrouded in his cloak, although her eyes still flicker to her grandfather.

"Where did you find it?" she asks, her words hesitant and stumbling - unlike her grandfather, she has learnt her English from radio and a few snatches of the chat of foreigners at local markets, so that it takes on a sing-song quality.

"A place far from here," the stranger says, and carefully hands it to her. "Across the sea. But look - it is broken." And so it is - one of the slender gold hands jumps and jitters with each passing second, but fails to move on past its current position, frozen as though time itself has stopped. "Can you repair it?"

"Of course." That same look of petulance and exasperation, as though he is an idiot to consider otherwise. Her shyness and fear seems forgotten as she takes the watch from him. She bends her dark head over the mechanism, and sets to work without tools, spinning one of the cogs with the edge of her thumbnail.

As the girl, Vika, silently works, the stranger looks at the grandfather, whose dark eyes have not stirred from his granddaughter. For the first time in what feels like forever, Magnus Bane smiles.

"I'll take her," he says, and his tone allows no arguments.


	5. The Graverobbers

_Marrakesh, Morocco - 1969_

Vika dodged the reach of an over-enthusiastic carpet-salesman with the grace of long experience, muttering under her breath with exasperation - not all of it aimed at the disappointed merchant with the sloped tarboosh cap who retreated rapidly back into the cool shade of his stall. She paused for the briefest of moments to push her long grey hair back from her face and took the opportunity to regret anew that she had neglected to cut the long locks short before she had found herself weaving her way through crowds in one of the many derbs of Marrakesh under the glare of the midday sun.

Here and there, patches of shade and shadow were to be found, thrown by the narrow, overleaning buildings or the cloths and clothes that hung overhead - but these precious spaces of cool and shade were already monopolized by weary, sunburnt and sweat-drenched tourists and those savvy local women who had gathered together to gossip in dialect while they kept eyes on running, darting children.

It should have been difficult to be unhappy in such a brightly coloured, buzzing place, but Vika, as per usual, proved herself the exception to any and all rules. She hated the sun, she hated the mosquitos that buzzed about her and she especially hated the tall, handsome, dark-haired warlock who had dragged her there and seemed to be hellbent now on leaving her behind. He was winding his path through the street-dentists and snake-charmers and dancers and pickpockets and they parted before him, as though there were a road laid out before him and all he had to do was follow it.

Vika was fortunate that her companion was so tall - she could still barely make out the tip of his inky hair above the brightly coloured turbans and the muted shades of the shawls worn by the crowd. Dialects of French, Arabic and Pashto rose above the heads of the crowd, buzzing and blending together into an indistinguishable tangle of emotion and words - although Vika spoke some of the languages, she would have been hard-pressed to discern any intelligble word.

She renewed her pace, unable to mimic the warlock's easy, languid grace as she ducked under the silks that curtained the street, dripping onto the heads of the crowds in shades of lapis lazuli and greenglass firefly wings and cardinal feathers. The air was thick with dust and smoke from backfiring engines, noisy motorcycles and the old men who crouched in doorways rolling dice and smoking hashish through gnarled pipes. Chickens and rabbits dyed baby blue and powder pink scratched at the bare ground and tangled underfoot, conspiring to break Vika's neck as she skirted an unfriendly goat with flinty eyes and caught sight of the snapping tail of her erstwhile companion's coat.

Her legs were long, his longer, and it took a few long moments of awkward jostling and half-jogging before she had caught up to him and resumed her original position - struggling to stay by his side as he moved, seemingly without rhyme or reason.  
"Next time we go abroad," she snapped in stilted English, too tired to bother being polite. "We go to -" She cast around for a location that was not so warm or crowded. "Bishkek," she said finally, sounding determined. "At least they, like civilized peoples al, eat angry goat."

"Do you speak Krygyz?" Magnus raised a dark eyebrow effortlessly, as though he knew how much it irritated her when he did that, but did not bother to look at her as he spoke - he was glancing about him, taking in everything at once.

"_Ооба_, but I don't speak Arabic either," she reminded him with a scowl. "But that didn't stop you dragging me out here to the middle of the desert, did it?"

"Mundanes," Magnus said, almost as though he were addressing only himself. "You have no concept of geography, do you? The desert, I assure you, is quite a few miles away. Not even you should be able to wander away into it from here. Then again, you have surprised me before with the extent of your idiocy, so stay close. I have no intention of looking for you if you get lost - camel hire rates are ridiculous around here."

She ignored him as best she could, craning her neck in an attempt to discern any possible reason for their presence here. As wonderful and evocative as the entire place was, the scene was beautiful in an entirely human way. There were no faery stalls heaped high with bones and teeth in the dark corners of the markets; Vika was certain that the red liquid being proferred here and there was only wine, and a foul tasting wine at that; she knew that most of Lillith's Children had far more visible warlock marks than Magnus, and she could see no tell-tale shimmer of a glamour; no dark demon shadows skittered or crept between the crowd. The streets seemed to be entirely mundane.

Who knew? Maybe there wasn't a reason. Maybe this was her first, last and only vacation. Maybe Magnus considered a breakneck race through the sweltering derbs to be a relaxing holiday in the sun.

By the Angel, she hoped not.

She hit into Magnus' shoulder without realising that he had stopped. He was glaring at the crowd in front of him, his golden eyes more playful than she had seen for weeks - whatever thoughts that has clouded his expression and furrowed brow his brow had evidently been put asode or had spun from his mind like autumn leaves from the skeletons of trees. The few hours in the sun had already darkened his complexion, and the blue fire of his magic cast unusual, unfamiliar shadows on his face as he raised his hands, cupping them together. "I really do need to lea

rn to be patient," he told the younger girl in a confidential tone, and then he swept his hands apart with a dramatic gesture.  
The crowd did not part, as Vika had been expected - rather, the crowd and everyone in it was shunted to one side of the street as though the entire world had tilted on its axis and sent them flying in the same direction, leaving the entire left side of the street clear for Magnus. Vika reached out automatically to steady an old woman who nearly fell, managing by some miracle to grasp her arm. "Magnus!" she snapped, but the warlock was already walking. With a hasty and garbled apology in stilted French to the old lady, who looked as though she couldn't process what had happened, Vika hurried after Magnus, who strode like he owned the place.

The alley he had so unceremoniously put into disarray opened up onto the square that they had been seeking, lined by restaurants and shops and closed storefronts. A few of the larger cafes had tables and sparse seating outside - it took Vika a few seconds to register the fact that they were probably present to visit the huge, burly, bearded werewolf who sat nearest the square, rather than the two shawled women with delicate features who sat in the corner or the Moroccan businessman nearest the door.

"Cain," Magnus greeted, his usual Indonesian accent melting away and twisting into an unfamiliar New York twang Vika had never heard him use before. It suited him, if she was honest - big, brassy, larger than life. "To what do we owe the pleasure?"

The werewolf straightened in his seat and Vika blinked as she realised just how huge the man was. Magnus was tall, but lean, and she was - well, tiny was not really an exaggeration. This guy looked like he would be able to break either of them in half with a stern gaze and a harsh word. If anyone looked like a cross between a biker and a grizzly bear, Vika thought that it would be this man - long black hair fell past his shoulders, grazing the pockets of the leather jacket that clad a chest roughly the size and shape of a barrel.

"Magnus," he rumbled, and Vika didn't feel that it would have been inaccurate to compare his bass tones to the growl of a Prague town tram. "Good to see you again." He extended a hand, and Vika found herself assessing it. Callused palms and leathery skim spoke of experience with physical labour, and a strange tattoo adorned his knuckle, half hidden by an embossed ring - not a rune, not quite. The werewolf's seemingly unwaverable smile faltered a little as Magnus ignored the proferred hand entirely, and he switched the subject. Swiftly. "And this is...?"

Magnus waved a hand airily. "Oh, call her whatever you want. God knows I do." He glanced at her. "Double espresso for me and some kind of alcoholic beverage for our friend here, Emily." Vika gritted her teeth and nodded. Crouching for a moment to pluck a smooth, flat rock from the ground, she entered the blessed shade of the restaurant. Somewhere in the darkness, a valiant fan buzzed uselessly and a radio spat out the latest race results faster than she could register.

She ordered the drinks through mime, pantomime and liberal pointing, and resolved for the hundreth time to bully Magnus into teaching her Arabic. She turned the rock over in her hand and handed it to the man as payment - he nodded and put it into the cash register without batting an eye. Once upon a time, Vika might have felt bad about the trick, but it wasn't as though Magnus paid her for her employment - she doubted he carried much money either, come to think of it.

She carried the tray back out to the midday heat - Cain nodded his thanks, mid-flow through some sort of explanation.  
"-ybe three, four nights in a row now. Got everyone riled up pretty bad down in my neighborhood, anyway. They're after planting more yesterday and today, but I have my suspicions, and no one wants a repeat of what happened before. If you could do anything, Magnus, we'd be grateful."

Vika passed Magnus his espresso. He nodded. "Thank you, Betty," he murmured distractedly in Indonesian, and then held up a hand to silence the werewolf. "I hate to point it out, Cain," he added in that unfamiliar New York drawl. "But let's address the elephant in the room, shall we? I am the High Warlock of Brooklyn. Quite a nice title, I grant you. Certainly has a great ring to it, and it comes with plenty of perks . But the fact remains that Brooklyn is a long way from Marrakesh and I have nothing to do with Morocco - I wouldn't be here if you hadn't messaged me and said it was urgent. My fees are quite steep for a job such as this - why not give it to one of your guys? The local Praetor Lupus or your own High Warlock?"

Cain hesitated, before he nodded and slid a scrap of paper across the table. "Because of this," he said simply. Magnus glanced at the sheet. This time, both eyebrows went up - an expression of equal parts surprise, trepidation and glee. "I see," he said, keeping his voice so level that only Vika would be able to identify the change. Vika craned her neck in an attempt to catch a glimpse - a black mark, swirling matrix of dark lines, a...

"Rune," she murmured.

"Quite right. But not just any rune." Magnus looked at Cain, and his eyes were bright and glinting. "Thank you for bringing this to my attention." He stood - Vika scrambled to follow suit. "Jessica," he said. "We're going to need some shovels. Procure them for me."

"Why?"

"Because we're going to rob a grave now." He tipped his hat to the werewolf. "Stay well, Cain." He spun on his heel. "Come along, Igor. We have mauseoleums to raid."

"Just one mauseoleum," Cain called after him anxiously. "Singular, Magnus."

Magnus shrugged rakishly with a sly grin. "What happens happens."


	6. Children's Stories

_Disclaimer: Credit for this chapter's first line goes to Laini Taylor's "Night of Cake and Puppets"._

_I'm sorry that this chapter has taken so long to be both written and published, and that it is so short! I hope to have another few up soon._

_All reviews are appreciated. If you have enjoyed any or all of these chapters, or if you have any criticisms, they would be greatly appreciated! Thank you._

* * *

**_The Altai Mountains, 1962_**

"... and Baba Yaga has been hunting me and Ragnor Fell ever since." The warlock paused and then cocked his head to listen at the window. "That doesn't sound like _claws_ on the roof, does it, si-kecil?" He had to smile a little at the way the girl's eyes widened with trepidation. "Well, it's probably just crows. Good night." And then he clicked off the light and shut the door firmly behind himself, leaving the young girl to fall asleep to the imagined scrape of a child-eating witch scaling the rotting wooden roof.

Oh, how Magnus Bane loved having an apprentice.

Catarina Loss did not share his mirth.

"You will make a terrible father someday, Magnus," the blue-skinned warlock observed dryly. Her long star-white hair was dusted with a slender lattice of snow and ice from the extreme weather outside.

"Children," Magnus said dismissively, waving his hand theatrically. "Who wants anything to do with those? Mark my word, Catarina, I'll be rotting six feet under before I have anything to do with those vile creatures."

Sixty years later, Catarina would remind Magnus of these words as they sat together outside the palatial Herondale manor and watched the dark-haired Bane children chase their other father around the garden. Magnus would vehemently deny ever speaking them, to Catarina's amusement - but that would be then, and a part of another story.

"Just tell me one thing," Catarina said, her voice low as though she were afraid to wake the mundane girl. "What possessed you to take an apprentice? A mundane, at that?"

Magnus was silent for a moment, and the blue fire skipped shadows from his high cheekbones and sent light flickering in the hollows of his throat and brow. It sounded foolish that he, Magnus Bane, who had sworn to always retain a sense of wonder, to always fall in love, be surprised, be open to being hurt as much as he was open go being happy, was afraid of the calcification that seemed to slowly be taking his immortal friends, one by one - Raphael and Ragnor, Camille and Catarina.

Of course, it sounded even more foolish to say that he believed this girl could be the solution to a mystery that had plagued him for four hundred and fifty years.

So.

"I was bored," he said, with an arrogant shrug of his shoulders and a casual flick of his hair.

"Bored," Catarina echoed. "Yes, when I'm bored I find it rather cathartic to adopt strange children and drag them up the side of a mountain in a blizzard."

Magnus smirked and pulled out the chair opposite the warlock, but before he could reply, a slender shadow was thrown across the room.

"She's outside." Viktora said, her dark hair wild. "The witch is outside."

"Don't be ridiculous,"Magnus said at the same moment that Catarina said, "You probably just heard the wind or something."

"I didn't _hear_ her. I _saw_ her."

Magnus opened his mouth to say something disparaging about Vika's eyesight and state of mind, but Catarina spoke before he could. She had stood and crossed to the lone window, coated in a thin sheen of ice and frost, and her pale brows furrowed.

"Magnus," she said tersely. "She's right. Something's out there."


	7. The Graverobbers II

_Marrakesh, Morocco - 1969_

"You could have the decency to look at least a little bit contrite," Vika remarked as Magnus began to dig up a corpse.

The heat was almost unbearable, as heat always was in Marrakesh, and the sky was an ethereal celeste, but the tableau before her seemed a scene from a horror movie set amidst the prototypical dark and stormy night. Magnus still wore his long peacoat, and his hair was as carefully untamed as ever, but now a smudge of clay marred his high cheekbone and there was the faint sheen of sweat across his brow.

Vika leaned against the cool marble of the mausoleum's pillar, grateful that the roof of the _sardab_, the crypt, offered her a little shade from Helios above. Despite her dark skin and even darker hair, Vika had been raised in a variety of invariably cold, wet and grey locales, and anything above sixty-six degrees nearly gave her heat stroke. She regretted not bringing a fan or parasol with her, as though she were a southern belle relaxing with a glass of iced tea on a plantation manor's porch. The image was so far from her reality that she almost laughed.

"I don't suppose," she said after a moment, when Magnus had not responded to her previous jibe, "That your sorcerous highness would consider the utilisation of magic?"

He arched his eyebrow once again, stirring fresh feelings of inadequacy and irritation in the younger girl, and gestured towards the pitiful dent he had so far made in the dirt. "Go ahead," he said, and even though his voice and smirk and eyebrow all foretold failure, Vika stepped forward anyway, and considered the obstacle.

She stretched out a hand and pulled at the ground, the same way she would when she made paper airplanes zoom around the apartment or tried to throw knives with her mind – such antics, she had soon learnt, were usually best left to the Shadowhunters.

No such luck – not only was the ground too heavy, too hefty and clumsy for her weak magic, but the earth actually _resisted_ her pull, as though they were magnets of corresponding polarity, jumped away from her touch, and she scowled.

She looked back up at her boss-slash-mentor-slash-adoptive-_something_ just in time to see the shovel being thrown at her. She caught it awkwardly, and glared – both eyebrows together, unfortunately.

"Dig," Magnus ordered, so she did.

* * *

The people of Marrakesh buried their bones deep, and these graves were deeper than most, so that the sun had moved westward across the sky and the evening cool had set in, before Vika had reached the corpse Magnus was looking for. It had been hours of digging up one grave after another, all of them near one another, all of them below the shade of the crypt, and each time, before Vika even reached the body, Magnus would order her onto the next one. It took a long time indeed before Vika had found one that Magnus wanted to actually look at.

She looked at it. "I didn't think Muslims buried their dead in coffins," she said, her exhaustion from excavating a grave causing her to revert to her native Romanian dialect.

Magnus looked gleeful. "They don't," he replied.

For the first time in a few hours, he stepped forward to help, and between them, they pulled the wooden box from the ground. It was a charity to call it a coffin, Vika could see now – she couldn't imagine burying _roadkill_ in such a rough contraption.

This was the only part of the job that Vika could ever imagine calling enjoyable, mainly because it called for the kind of skills she was rarely allowed to implement in everyday life. At Magnus' nod, she pulled the pinchbar into her hand and began to prise open the box. Whoever had nailed this thing shut had wanted it to stay that way, she decided.

All of the nails popped free at almost the same second, and she nearly lost her balance, catching herself ungracefully on the wall as her centre of gravity shifted all at once. She stared down into the dark box, and scowled, more out of discomfort than anything else. She had performed many unsavoury tasks as Magnus' errand girl, but she still didn't like handling dead things, although she could never say why. The unnatural stillness, perhaps, and the way the eyes stared. Strangely enough, she couldn't care less about the smell.

_This_ corpse was no exception, although, as she forced herself to focus, she could not identify anything unusual enough about the body to prompt one of Magnus' visits. The man was not young, but also not old. He was of an average height, and of an average weight. He had medium-brown skin and medium-brown hair, and although Vika could not see his eyes, she guessed that those were medium-brown also.

"Yes," she said. "This is fascinating indeed. I believe we may have just discovered the most average man in existence. Good job, boss."

"If you were half as smart as you thought you were, then you would be twice as smart as you are," Magnus replied, and left the girl to puzzle as he crouched next to the Extraordinarily Average Man, and began to study him as one might study a particularly unusual butterfly, or a lame ploughhorse. The thought occurred to Vika again that this was what mundanes were to Magnus, nothing more than dumb animals stumbling through life half-blind, and for the briefest moment she felt like strangling something.

"I don't know many average men, let alone _mundanes_, that are buried with those sigils," Magnus pointed out, and, leaning closer, Vika saw for the first time the runes that had been carved into the surface of the coffin. They were not the beautiful, overlapping black lines of the Grey Book runes – these were rough and angular, sharp and sweeping, a chickenscratch rather than calligraphy.

"What do they mean?" Vika asked, more to herself than Magnus, who was equally immersed in his own thoughts. Vika pulled her notebook from her pocket and crouched with the stub of a pencil in her hand to copy them down as best and as quickly as she could. Dusk was falling more quickly now, and she was superstitious – a bad habit that Magnus still teased her about.

"Cordelia."

They seemed almost created, pushed and pulled and wrenched into shape, and the idea of doing that to _magic _was both disgusting and frightening. Done badly, it could be insanely destructive. Done right, she guessed that it had the potential to hold explosive power.

"Mary."

The more Vika copied down the runes, the more she was confused. These were not the pure expression of magic that she knew from Catarina's scrolls and Ragnor's books, the glyphs of power that she had spent hours copying from one leatherbound tome to another in her childhood. They were bastardised, an artificial emulation, a grotesque twisting of magic.

"_Violet_."

She looked up then, first to Magnus, and then away, following his gaze, trying to find whatever it was that he had alerted her to. The falling twilight had drawn the gauzy veil of dusk over the graveyard, but it would have taken a far darker night to hide the figures that moved towards them, trampling heedless over graves, single-minded in their objective.

Magnus' words were barely breathed. "Are those…?"

"Yes," she said, and now it was Vika's turn to be gleeful, her dark eyes bright, as all of her childhood prayers were answered at once and she hefted the crowbar into her grip once more, this time as a weapon of mass destruction. "_Zombies_."


End file.
